Lesson #1 from boat building.

Always do the most accurate and best work you can, so that when you screw up, which you will, it is just not that big of a deal.

Setting up frames starts by drawing them as accurately as you can from the blueprints. Richard Woods has a simple way of drawing his stations and one can easily draw them without lofting the boat. The frames are drawn on 5/8 particle board and cut out as accurately as possible. As part of the design I added a sighting hole and two screw holes that will allow me to place the frames on my strong back as accurately as possible. If you pay close attention you will see that I decided against adding the knuckle on my boat after carefully considering the work and complexity involved.

Frames getting aligned and faired. Notice the lines used to draw the frames

Back side of frames showing the mounting boards

View through the sighting hole

View of the plywood box strong back. Notice that at this point all frames have been covered in blue masking tape in preparation for stripping.

I had a couple frames that ended up a little off. The time to fix it is before you start planking. I found that temporarily adding a shear strip, waterline strip and a center line strip quickly found the offending forms.